How to Avoid losing to “Luck”

Overview

Feel like you’re constantly losing because you’re unlucky? Because the RNG Gods hate you?Feel like you lost because you got dealt an impossible hand? Well fret no more.This guide is here to show you that you’re not just the most unlucky person in existence.(NOTE: THIS GUIDE WAS WRITTEN FOR FTL CLASSIC IN 2013, NOT ADVANCED EDITION!)

Disclaimer

Quick update: I want to point out that this guide was written for classic FTL – not Advanced Edition. In the original game, boarding crew was very powerful, and if micromanaged properly could help you win most games. With the introduction of hacking, mind control, lanius crew, and nerfed rewards for defeating cruisers by boarding – I would say that boarding is, while still powerful, much worse than it used to be. In my opinion, AE is significantly less consistent, especially if you’re using one of the weaker cruisers. With the DLC, I think luck plays a far more significant role in determining whether or not you’ll win.

Understanding why you lost (PART I)

There are very few truly impossible situations in this game, especially past the first sector, yet a lot of new players will complain they’ve lost to some unbeatable enemy cruiser or some impossible scenario. After 100 hours of playing this game, I feel like the majority of my deaths are a result of my own failures rather than a simple roll of the dice. This guide is about how to prepare for nearly any situation by covering your bases, so that even in the most dire of situations you can still pull through. Learning why you got killed is the first step to understanding what you’ll need to prepare for on the road ahead.

Probably the most common way that you’ll be killed, especially if you’re new to the game, is getting killed by enemy boarders — especially while under attack from an enemy ship at the same time. Even when you feel invincible with your upgraded shields and engines, boarders are the Achilles heel for the average pilot. A lot of it comes down to just not what knowing what to do in any given situation.

The Golden Rule: Get blast doors. If you are entering a “red” sector (Mantis, Rock, Pirate, Rebel, etc.) or you’re about to enter sector 3 or deeper, you should have upgraded doors.

Advanced Edition Tip:
Even though you can man the doors system to give yourself blast doors do NOT rely on this. If your door operator is mind-controlled you’ll be screwed. Also keep in mind that upgrading blast doors increases the room’s HP!

(Blast Doors cost 35 in FTL: Advanced Edition)

If they boarded a manned room (Weapons, Shields, etc.)…
Although there are many strategies, the easiest method is to vent the entire ship (except the Medbay), turn off oxygen and move all your crew to the Medbay. In many situations, you can actually send all but one of your crew back to their stations, and the enemy boarders will stay in the medbay and fight it out.

If they boarded the pilot’s seat…
The pilot’s seat is usually one of the most annoying places to get boarded, since leaving the room unmanned is often very risky. Venting it out is not a good option unless you have enough shields to be immune to enemy damage and they have no missiles. If you lack sufficient crew to fight them off, try venting the rooms and luring them to a different room, then run back to the pilot’s seat afterwards.

If they boarded an unmanned room (Doors, Oxygen, Empty, etc.)…
Vent their room as well as rooms you don’t want them to enter. Typically speaking, once a room has been drained of oxygen they will go to the nearest non-empty room with oxygen in it. This means you can sort of force them to go to a particular room (usually healing room). Additionally, if your ship design allows for it, you can constantly juggle them back and forth between two rooms and slowly kill them.

You managed to defeat the enemy or you jumped away, but only barely. Your oxygen room is red and has a hull crack, you are approaching 0% oxygen, your crew is heavily damaged but staying alive by sitting in the Medbay. Now what? A lot of people just Alt+F4 at this point. However, there’s a foolproof way to survive this horrible situation.

This will require at least three crewmembers and a level 2 medbay (or a Healing Burst). With upgraded healing, you are able to get to full HP despite having no oxygen. Once all your crew is fully healed, send two of them to go repair the oxygen room. When your crew gets to about half HP, send one of them back to the Medbay and send the full HP crewmember to replace him. Constantly cycle through your crew, making sure at least one man is repairing the oxygen at all times, until it’s fully repaired.

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It’s also worth noting that a single Sys Repair drone can save you in this situation, as long as your Drone Control is not broken.

This is a pretty common death even with experienced players due to Solar Flares. The chain-reaction effect of fires makes them one of the most painful situations to deal with. Even if you run to the medbay and vent out your entire ship, if you’re fighting an enemy cruiser he’ll just shoot you to pieces. If your weapons, engines, shields or pilot gets disabled in a situation like that: you’re screwed. So what’s the best way to deal with a fire?

The most important thing to do is stop the fire from spreading. It depends on each ship layout, but venting out rooms in such a way that you create deadzones is very important. Otherwise the fire will spread at an alarming rate until your entire ship is ablaze.

There’s really no fancy tricks to putting out fires, although you’ll really learn to appreciate Rockmen and Sys Repair drones if you’ve been annhilated by fires too often since they are fire-proof. Sysrepair is especially good since they don’t need oxygen, either. It’s worth noting that Engies extinguish fires quicker than any other crew, but using them can be risky.

– “We don’t fear fire – fire fears us.”

You have only enough weapons to get through 2 shields, and they have 3 shields. Great, now what? This situation is especially common among newer players, but facing an enemy cruiser that you cannot kill happens more often than you’d think. It’s usually a result of not buying or finding any additional weapons to your starting arsenal, and depending on which ship you played you’ll need to find a new weapon as soon as possible or you’re screwed. A lot of people are going to scream “I got unlucky, this game is stupid.”

Pro Tip: You won’t always have weapons available to you. That’s all there is to it. Sometimes you just WON’T get more weapons, it happens. So instead, you’ll have to utilize what you do have: drones or boarding crew.

When you’re unable to pierce shields with lasers and ions alone, you’ll find that missiles and bomb-type weapons are invaluable – even against the final boss a single missile or bomb-type weapon could mean the difference between winning and losing. As far as drones go, Anti-Ship will essentially reduce their shields by 1 as long as it continues to fire, Anti-Ship Mark II will reduce it by 2. Beam drones are worthless if you don’t have enough weapons to knock down their shields.

– Drones are a good substitute for weapons in many situations.

As far as boarding goes, as everyone knows, this is the most powerful offensive (and defensive) option. Essentially you’ll want to build your boarding crew up as soon as possible and try to knock down their shields as soon as possible so your weapons can start firing – alternatively just kill their entire crew for the extra loot. Boarding the enemy is not only amazing early into the game, but almost essential for killing the boss since you can disable all of his weapons instantly.

Regardless, in the chance you got no extra weapons, drones or boarding crew… your last option is to just FTL away. Yep, that’s all you can really do. Investing a few points into engines can make a big difference here.

Understanding why you lost (PART II)

You just missed 10 shots in a row on the enemy cruiser, and you actually flat-out died from hull damage as a result. While not very common, this does happen. Honestly there’s nothing you can do about missing shots, its inevitable, the game does have random elements to it. But there are a couple of things you could have done to prepare for a situation like this beforehand.

Don’t rely on instantly breaking their weapons. A lot of players make the grave mistake of thinking they can just instantly shoot the enemy Weapons room and be able to clean up a fight and take little to no damage. Because they have this false sense of security, they often will pump all of their money into more weapons, drones, boarding crew and won’t worry too much about getting extra defense.

Use boarding crew to distract their captain. This is probably the best option you have to avoid random luck. Especially when boarding ships with fewer crewmembers and no healing room, this works like a charm. Just remember if you have a Mantis boarder running back and forth between two rooms he’s not going to get attacked. Once their captain leaves the pilot room to fight you off, you will no longer miss any shots. Besides. The shots from your boarders can’t miss!

– “Hey, over here!”

Upgrade defenses before getting more weapons. Once you have enough weapons to pierce 3 shields, focus on defense – the sooner the better. If you take damage then you must eventually repair that hull and that costs money. Buying defense first means you’ll take less damage, and thus save money. It’s a good investment. Additionally, if you run into situations where you miss an absurd amount of shots in a row, you’ll still be able to survive.

This is probably the most embarassing way to die, you were charging up your shot, ready to disable the enemy Weapons room… then they disable YOUR weapons room. While you desperately attempt to repair and get your weapons back online, they start hitting other rooms and it’s all downhill from there. You might survive, but you’ll probably take a lot of hull damage. There’s a few very important strategies to note when dealing with enemies who get passed your shields with either enough laser shots or a missile.

Upgrade your rooms +1. This might seem strange at first, since you need two levels in shields for each point of shield, and having more energy into weapons than you actually need doesn’t make your weapons better. The real reason is so that you can take an extra point of damage in these rooms before they shut down. This is absolutely crucial if you have long-charging weapons, since if they are hit before you get your shot off, you’re gonna really be hurting. You can do the same thing with Oxygen and Pilot rooms too, since the upgrades are fairly cheap and can really make a difference.

Buy Drone Control, even if you don’t plan on using it. Probably the most amazing meta-tip that anyone will ever give you, buying an empty Drone Control room is an 80-scrap investment that basically acts as a missile-magnet. Even while broken, enemy cruisers are likely to shoot your Drone room just as often as your weapons room.

Think about it like this: the chance they will target your weapons room is essentially decreased for each non-empty room you have. Don’t bother putting extra points into it, however, or even repairing it. Whether or not the room is red has no affect on their targeting decision.

You played absolutely perfectly™ and still lost? This guide is about RNG-mitigation: in other words, minimizing the number of ways in which you can die, and leaving less things up to a dice roll that could be deterministic instead. Micromanging your boarding crew, knowledge of which events have the best rewards (and which will kill crewmembers and make you ragequit), keeping your options open, and playing a little more efficiently each time will improve your winrate.

“help”

Planning for the Inevitable

Now that you understood why you lost, all that’s left to do is plan for the future and try not to repeat mistakes. By this point in the guide, if you’ve thoroughly read the first two sections, you’ll have probably learned nearly everything you’ll need to know since understanding why you lost is the most important concept to getting better at the game.

These are the most important sectors to decide how well you’re going to do for the rest of the game. Even when using the weakest ships in the game like DA-SR 12 or The Vortex, you shouldn’t really have too much trouble in these sectors. Although it depends on which cruiser you’re using, the strategy is more or less the same here. Jump to as many nodes as possible and build up crewmembers. By sector 3 it’s ideal to have a boarding crew ready to go so you can start reaping the rewards; since the first couple of sectors rarely give trouble to even inexperienced players they are ideal for gathering a boarding crew.

The next most important thing is to have enough weapons to pierce 3 shields on an enemy cruiser. Since for the majority of the game, this is what you’ll be facing. It’s not until the very late sectors where you will face more than this, and by then your boarders will be strong enough to deal with ships like that. Getting additional weapons is not really a good idea until you’ve secured all other priorities. Just because you have a huge laser salvo doesn’t mean you’re somehow immune to fires and enemy boarders, afterall.

Next comes defensive measures. You should have at least 2 layers of shields by Sector 3, and 3 layer of shield by Sector 5. You should get about 25~30% Evasion as soon as you can. Cloaking and Defense drones also fall into this priority. Getting Cloak early on is absolutely amazing as it can turn most battles into a joke for you if used properly. Blast doors are a REQUIREMENT before going to Sector 3. If you don’t upgrade your doors early enough, boarders are going to be a real threat.

Utilities are important for various things. Getting level 2 Medbay is pretty important as it can help in situations where you’re at risk of dying to a lack of oxygen. System repair drones and Engineers can be very important when you’ve recieved a hull crack in a very important room. Sometimes just having engineers to quickly repair your weapons or shields can make the difference between winning or losing a fight. Zoltans can provide a free point of energy, which is amazing for the boss fight since you can go over the 25 energy cap. Slugs are good for nebula.

Finally, additional weapons. If all your other bases are covered, extra weapons are really nice. Just don’t sacrifice an essential upgrade so you can get another big weapon, it’s almost never a good idea. Humans only use is being decent at any role, but aren’t good at anything in specific. They’re really a last-resort if you couldn’t find anything else better.

Once you’ve got to this point, you should be preparing for the boss fight in sector 8. It helps if you can get enough crew to board his ship and kill all of his crew, or if you have a way to disable the shields and kill the crew with weapons somehow. Healing Burst is really powerful in situations like these. Level 2 Cloaking is important to deal with the Mass-Drones attack on stage 2, and an anti-ship drone or fast-firing weapons are really nice for the third stage of the boss. You’ll need enough weapons to pierce 4 shields, or just get some missiles/bomb-type weapons.

Other than that, just get as much scrap and upgrades as possible, and good luck.